About the Book
The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a space for studying
the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together,
the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility.
Volume 1 provides an introduction to the study of mobile music through the examination of its devices, markets, and theories. Conceptualizing a long history of mobile music extending from the late nineteenth
century to the present, the volume focuses on the conjunction of human mobility and forms of sound production and reproduction. The volume's chapters investigate the MP3, copyright law and digital
downloading, music and cloud computing, the iPod, the transistor radio, the automated call center, sound and text messaging, the mobile phone, the militarization of iPod usage, the cochlear implant, the portable sound recorder, listening practices of schoolchildren and teenagers, the ringtone, mobile music in the urban soundscape, the boombox, mobile music marketing in Mexico and Brazil, music piracy in India, and online radio in Japan and the US.
Table of Contents:
Contents 1. Anytime/Anywhere? An Introduction to the Devices, Markets and Theories of Mobile Music
Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek Part I: Theorizing Mobile Music
2. How the MP3 Became Ubiquitous
Jonathan Sterne
3. Is a Download a Performance?
Marc Perlman
4. In Divisible Mobility: Music in an Age of Cloud Computing
Martin Scherzinger
5. Divisible Mobility: Music in an Age of Cloud Computing
Michael Bull
6. Changing Cultural Coordinates: The Transistor Radio and Space / Time / Identity
Tim Wall and Nick Webber Part II: Mobility, Sound and Communication
7. Labor, Machines, IVR Enabled Automated Call Centers, and the Design of an Audible Workplace
David McCarthy
8. Mobile Semiotics Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien
9. Calling my Name: Sound, Orality and the Cell Phone Contact List
Heather A. Horst
10. What Is that Noise? An Analysis of Sound Quality and Music in Mobile Devices
Katie M. Lever-Mazzuto
11. Aural Armor: Charting the Militarization of the iPod in Operation Iraqi Freedom
J. Martin Daughtry Part III: Devices That Listen (The Politics of Aurality)
12. Cochlear Implants after Fifty Years: An Interview with Charles Graser
Mara Mills
13. Music Ethnography and Recording Technology in the Unbound Digital Era
Anna Schultz and Mark Nye Part IV: Children, Adolescents and Mobile Music Listening
14. Forever and Ever: Mobile Music in the Life of Young Teens
Arild Bergh, Tia DeNora, and Maia Bergh
15. Earbuds Are Good for Sharing: Children's Headphones as Social Media at a Vermont School
Tyler Bickford Part V: Urban Ecologies and Politics
16. Can You Hear Us Now? Ringtones and Politics in the Contemporary Philippines
Jan M. Padios
17. Stereos in the City: Moving Through Music in South India
Sindhumathi Revuluri
18. Urban Echoes: The Boombox and Sonic Mobility in the 1980s
Joseph Schloss and Bill Bahng Boyer Part VI: National Mobile Music Markets
19. Mexican Mobile Music: Una Convergencia con Sabor
Patrick Burkart and Christopher Joseph Westgate
20. Music Piracy, Commodities, and Value: Digital Media in the Indian Marketplace
Jayson Beaster-Jones
21. A Tale of Two Countries: Online Radio in the United States and Japan
Noriko Manabe
22. Mobile Tactics in the Brazilian Independent Music Industry
Kariann Goldschmitt Index
About the Author :
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013). His writings on Steve Reich, musical minimalism, Marxism, academic politics, ringtones, Bob Dylan, and Benjamin Britten have appeared in scholarly journals including Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Society for American Music, and First Monday, and
in the edited collections Sound Commitments, Highway 61 Revisited, and Music and Narrative since 1900. Jason Stanyek is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Oxford, where he is also Fellow and Tutor in Music at St John's College. His writings on Brazilian music, improvisation, music technology, and jazz have appeared in a range of academic journals and edited collections. Forthcoming books include a monograph on music and dance in the Brazilian diaspora and a volume (co-edited with Frederick Moehn) titled Brazil's Northern Wave: Fifty Years of Bossa Nova in the United
States.
Review :
"[A] very welcome and totally immersive experience." --International Record Review
